Overview

A dual portrait of America's first great architect, Henry Hobson Richardson, and her finest landscape designer, Frederick Law Olmsted--and their immense impact on AmericaAs the nation recovered from a cataclysmic war, two titans of design profoundly influenced how Americans came to interact with the built and natural world around them through their pioneering work in architecture and landscape design. Frederick Law Olmsted is widely revered as America's first and finest parkmaker and environmentalist, the force behind Manhattan's Central Park, Brooklyn's Prospect Park, Biltmore's parkland in Asheville, dozens of parks across the country, and the preservation of Yosemite and Niagara Falls. Yet his close friend and sometime collaborator, Henry Hobson Richardson, has been almost entirely forgotten today, despite his outsized influence on American architecture--from Boston's iconic Trinity Church to Chicago's Marshall Field Wholesale Store to the Shingle Style and the wildly popular ""open plan"" he conceived for family homes. Individually they created much-beloved buildings and public spaces. Together they married natural landscapes with built structures in train stations and public libraries that helped drive the shift in American life from congested cities to developing suburbs across the country. The small, reserved Olmsted and the passionate, Falstaffian Richardson could not have been more different in character, but their sensibilities were closely aligned. In chronicling their intersecting lives and work in the context of the nation's post-war renewal, Hugh Howard reveals how these two men created original all-American idioms in architecture and landscape that influence how we enjoy our public and private spaces to this day.

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9780802159236

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Reviews

Praise for Architecture's Odd Couple: Distinguished by clarity, narrative energy and evocative description . . . An appealing primer in 20th-century American architecture, with myriad insights into the vanity and interpersonal politics of the two men who dominated American architecture for a century. --Washington Post This informative dual biography argues that despite their difference the two architects influenced each other's work. --New York Times Book Review Architecture's Odd Couple satisfies an American need for gigantic personalities in adversarial postures . . . There [may] have been better books about Frank Lloyd Wright, but never a better account of Philip Johnson. --Spectator Read Architecture's Odd Couple for an introduction to Wright's beautiful buildings, his spectacle of an ego, his architectural-political philosophy, and for his influence on Johnson--the younger, fame-hungry architect who ends up serving as Wright's aperitif. --Washington Free Beacon Howard's prose is fluid, and he deftly explains technical terms without slowing the story. The result is narrative non-fiction of a high order, enlivened by anecdotes and quotations from two very outspoken and colorful characters. --Publishers Weekly An in-depth portrait of two 'grand men of American architecture' . . . New light is shed on both architects in this absorbing, well-organized, delightfully told story. --Kirkus Reviews Hugh Howard's nimble narrative . . . is about the on-again off-again relationship between Wright and Philip Johnson, a pairing that a novelist couldn't have improved upon . . . Howard moves fluidly from Wright to Johnson and back in chapters that alternate between key moments of intersection between the two men and their major works . . . A lively and insightful chapter of American architectural history. --Buffalo News Howard, a noted historian and author of eleven architecture titles, paints an expert picture of the relationship, during which the architects challenged each other and ultimately produced some of the nation's most enduring architectural works. --Architectural Digest

Author Information

Hugh Howard is the author of numerous books on architecture and design, including Architecture's Odd Couple; Dr. Kimball and Mr. Jefferson; Thomas Jefferson: Architect; Houses of the Founding Fathers; and a memoir, House-Dreams. He lives in New Hampshire.

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